Camera is positioned as if in the audience at a vaudeville or burlesque show. Two men with long hair and beards in rough clothing appear to be eating and talking in a box on the left as a female aerialist sits on a trapeze over the stage and its painted backdrop of trees. Fully dressed in street clothing, the trapezist removes her jacket and hat before performing a flip. She stands to remove her skirt and then sits back down on the bar as she takes off her corset and throws it to the country bumpkins in the box, who fight over the undergarment. The trapezist continues to disrobe, removing her shoes, stockings, and garters, again throwing the latter to the men, and then seemingly hangs upside down (with her feet anchored off-camera) as she slips off her petticoat. Thus clad only in tights, trunks, and a camisole, the woman performs her trapeze act to the increasingly excited men. - From the Library Of Congress description


This movie is part of the collection: Stock Footage

Producer: Thomas Edison
Audio/Visual: silent, black and white
Keywords: stock footage; standard 4:3; historic; 1901; trapeze; strip tease; burlesque; humor; comedy

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: Donfield - - March 18, 2011
Subject: Hot swinging action for 1901
Film historians might try to interpret this as an Edisonian allegory on the emerging role of women in what would become one of the defining mediums of the 20th century.

Reviewer: 1110babe - - July 27, 2010
Subject: Thomas Edison had some interesting notions
Think of the great man deciding to film a strip tease act.... The technological advance over the peepshow that was the advance over dirty French postcards? What? No cries about sexploitation films here? :) Let's face it, from the beginning of time people have wanted to get a cheap thrill. My rating was for holding its audience to the end.

And yes, those men DO remind a person of the ones on the Muppet Show!

Reviewer: sav rekons - - May 30, 2009
Subject: trapeze
reminds of them two old blokes on the muppets show, if your old enough to remember them.

sav rekons 3 stars

Reviewer: Teresa23 - - July 11, 2008
Subject: How times have changed.
what was then R rated even X rated material is by now a days G rated.

Credits

Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division.